Shubhodeep Pal rummages the questions and answers between CIA and The Paris Review that depicted by
the writer.
On June 15, 1984 - a few days after Operation Blue Star - the New York Times ran an article outlining, and then carefully debunking, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's fears that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had funded terrorism in Punjab (through Pakistan) to destabilize India. The agency had been on her mind for years. In 1973, following the CIA-supported coup against the Chilean president, Salvador Allende (that resulted in his death), Mrs Gandhi had expressed private fears of being assassinated by the agency.
Unsurprisingly, after her assassination by a Sikh bodyguard in October 1984, the Soviet Union jumped into the fray, eager to exploit an opportunity to blame the CIA for yet another machination. In the years that have followed, the "foreign hand" - especially America's - has become a bit of a joke to indicate an abdication of responsibility by those in power. From a topic of serious drawing room conversations in the '70s and '80s, it has receded to the background as irrelevant chatter.
Joel Whitney's Finks is written to re-ignite the chatter. By leaning mostly on The Paris Review and its founders' ties to the CIA, it attempts to piece together various threads of how the CIA tried to influence the "culture wars" worldwide. The Cold War era was not just about covert operations, assassinations and economic warfare. Significant resources were allocated to ensure that the American way of thinking gained eminence globally, while scuppering similar Soviet attempts. To achieve this, the CIA set up the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which established and funded media outlets worldwide - from The Paris Review in Paris to Encounter in the United Kingdom and Quest and Imprint in India.
One reason for the general shrugging off of American espionage - and its perverse effects on various governments and their citizens from the Middle East to Latin America - is because it appears like a distant, undefined spectre (this is true despite America's role in influencing presidential elections as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000, according to political scientist Dov Levin).
However, this spectre assumes definition as soon as we discover that beloved bits of our culture were fronts for government propaganda. Especially unnerving is that, according to Whitney, "renowned men of letters will disappear and reappear beside portraits of liberal hawks, nonaligned leftist novelists and Western-yearning Russian dissidents, characters such as Boris Pasternak, Nelson Aldrich, John Berger, James Baldwin, Jayaprakash Narayan, Pablo Neruda, Arthur Miller, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez."
Whitney, a co-founder of the online literary magazine Guernica, begins with the promise of grand revelations, but fails to deliver on it. The book is richly researched and finely detailed but reads like an academic paper keen to underline the many connections it has unearthed. It offers detail after detail with an absence of both humor and intrigue. "Like other CCF-friendly magazines, The Paris Review learned to tap the patronage… The CCF's national offices around the world subscribed to The Paris Review while the USIS [US Information Service], the agency tapped for overseas propaganda, also boosted the magazine's circulation."
Moreover, the book never arrives at the central, shocking revelation that it seems set up for. For instance, he mentions Jayaprakash Narayan's connections to the CCF, as well as that of Quest and Imprint magazines. But from his research, it appears that none of these connections had a significant America-centric impact. The same is true of The Paris Review - Whitney struggles to prove the CCF's support undermined the quality of the publication. Instead, one idly wonders about the potentially interesting story in Mrs Gandhi's assertions of CIA involvement, as well as her well-documented face-off with JP, coupled with his fronting for a CIA-funded organization.
There is an edifying lesson, especially in the book's documentation of how governments can influence people through objects of cultural exchange. Today, one such object is WhatsApp - and one doesn't have to go too far to see how it's being used by the current dispensation to influence elections, or to swing sympathies for or against a particular community. The websites OpIndia, the re-established Swarajya magazine, and Arnab Goswami's Republic TV are reminders that cultural propaganda has been an undying feature of the last century.
As a record of the CIA's excesses, Finks will undoubtedly be classified as "important". Its many elaborate chapters contain useful nuggets of information for those looking to research the CIA's extensive cultural warfare. However, as a general interest book, it is a crashing bore. That is perhaps the only crime the CIA has never been accused of.
The reviewer is a writer and photographer. This review has appeared at www.indianexpress.com